The humans are dead

The humans are dead

One of the songs by New Zealand’s Flight of the Chonchords, which is by the way an amazing show that music and Borat fans must watch, is about how in the distant future, the year 2000, the humans are dead. Robots used poisonous gasses to poison our a$$es. Robotic beings rule the world and the only dances left are the robot and the roboboogie:

Humor aside, some winds in the QA world are blowing this way, bringing forward the machine uprising, or Judgement Day if you will. I’ve recently been informed that a major company in my country fired an entire team of software testers because the automation can do their job!

I can imagine their linear line of thought. Testing automation is cheap. We don’t need to weed out thousands of dollars for monkey manual tester salaries. Instead we would only need to pay for the electricity the machine and the aircon take up, plus one person to operate it. It does the same job, maybe even better since the machine can run tests 24/7. The results could even be more accurate since the automation doesn’t miss a thing.

So what do you think about such a line of thought? There is an ongoing hype pro automation, that automation is here to replace all the manual testing that we do. Whatever repetitive action a person does when testing manually, the automation can do. Do you agree?

Having had some automation running and programming experience myself, I’m going to dive into this issue in a short series of posts. I hope you won’t be shy, and leave some good comments what you think about the whole man vs. machine issue in regards to testing, and in general if you wish as well. Stay tuned for more!